Ann Martin - Claudia And The Mystery At The Museum

Janine stared at me. "You sound like an art critic," she said. "How do you know all that?" She looked very impressed.

I shrugged. "I don't know," I said. "I read about it, and look at books that have pictures of people's work." This didn't seem like a big deal to me, but I guess not everyone knows a Brancusi from a Noguchi. Anyway, I was kind of enjoying watching Janine's jaw drop. That’s not a sight I see too often.

I went back to the article. "Oh, awesome," I said. "This piece I saw in New York is going to be there. Ifs called 'Daphne'."

"Daphne?" repeated Janine. "That’s a name from the Roman myths. She was Apollo's first love, but she didn't love him back. In fact, she begged the gods to turn her into a tree so she could get away from him."

"That makes sense," I said, thoughtfully. "The sculpture is abstract, but when I saw it, I thought of a woman — and a tree. Ifs rounded, but there are these branches reaching up from it."

"Daphne became a laurel tree," said Janine, "and from then on laurel was very important to the Romans. They made laurel branches into wreaths, and ..."

I had stopped listening. Janine has this habit of telling you more about certain subjects than you ever want to know. I've learned to tune her out. I had started thinking about something else, anyway. Here's what it was: I was dying to go to that show, and I wanted to take someone with me, to share it.

Right away I thought of some of the children I baby-sit for. I love to baby-sit. I do it a lot, and I'm even in a dub that’s about babysitting. Ifs called the BSC, for Baby-sitters dub, and my best friends are in it. I'll tell you more about it later. Anyway, I was giving art

lessons to some of the kids around the time that Mimi died. And even though I was incredibly sad about losing Mimi, I was able to get a lot of pleasure out of teaching the kids to love art the way I do. I knew they would like the Newman show, and from what I had heard, there would be plenty of other things for them to see and do at the museum, too.

I headed for the phone. Janine was still droning on about Greek and Roman myths, but I ignored her. I made a few calls, and soon my plans were all set. I would go to the museum that Thursday, after school. And I would take three children with me: Corrie Addison, who had been one of my favorite art pupils, and the Arnold twins, Carolyn and Marilyn. I'm not sure who was looking forward to the trip more, me or the kids. Either way, I couldn't wait until Thursday.

Chapter 2.

On Monday, Mom brought a book home from the library. It was about contemporary American artists, and it included a few pages about Don Newman. I read every word and studied the pictures. Then, on Tuesday, the Stoneybrook News carried a long article about the exhibit at the museum. I saw a picture of Don Newman, and he looked really neat — like a big teddy bear, with a full beard and horn-rimmed glasses.

As you can imagine, by Wednesday I was totally psyched for the show — and I still had to wait a day! That afternoon my friends came over to my house for a BSC meeting, and I think I almost drove them crazy raving about Don Newman's work.

"Enough, already, Claud," said Kristy. "It's time for the meeting to start, anyway." She pointed to my digital clock, which had just clicked to 5:30. Kristy Thomas is the president

of the BSC, and she's very strict about meetings starting punctually.

Maybe the best way to tell you about my friends in the BSC is to tell you about this game we once played at a sleepover: If you had to be an animal, what kind of animal would you be?

Kristy said she would be a dog. That made sense — Kristy loves dogs. Her favorite hat has a picture of a collie on it, in memory of Louie, her first dog. Now her family has a Bernese Mountain dog puppy named Shannon. And Kristy is friendly and loyal and hardworking, so I guess she'd make a pretty good dog.

Kristy is the one who thought up the idea for the BSC. She realized how convenient it would be for parents to be able to dial one phone number and reach a whole bunch of experienced sitters, instead of having to make a zillion calls every time they needed someone to watch their kids. Like most of Kristy's ideas, this one was very simple, but it worked perfectly. The BSC has always had plenty of business. At first we advertised, with fliers and newspaper ads, but now we hardly ever need to do that. Satisfied parents are the only ad-ertising we need.

Anyway, back to Kristy. She has long brown hair and brown eyes, and she's kind of short. She's not interested in fashion or makeup at

all; she dresses in jeans and a turtleneck shirt just about every day. She says she's too busy to bother with dressing up, and I guess she is. She runs the BSC, coaches a softball team for little kids, and gets involved with all kinds of projects. Also, she has a huge family, so sometimes her house is chaotic. Kristy has two older brothers, Charlie and Sam, and one younger one, David Michael. That’s the family she grew up with: her brothers and her mother. Her dad cut out on the family way back when David Michael was a baby.

But Kristy's family has changed — and grown — a lot in the last year or so. It all started when Kristy's mom fell in love with a man named Watson Brewer, who happens to be mega-rich. When they got married, Kristy and her brothers moved across town to live in Watson's mansion. (They used to live across the street from me.) Watson has two children from his first marriage, Karen and Andrew, who live with him part-time. And soon after their marriage, Watson and Kristy's mom decided to adopt a baby, so Emily Michelle came to live with them, too. She's an incredibly cute two-and-a-half-year-old Vietnamese girl. Soon after she arrived, Kristy's grandmother (everybody calls her Nannie) moved in to help out with everything. Full house, right? And that’s

not even counting the pets — Shannon, Boo-Boo the cat, and the goldfish.

I don't have any pets, but when the game got around to me, I decided I'd be a wildly colored jungle parrot. I envision plumes of red, gold, green, and blue. Purple tail feathers. A bright yellow beak. The flashiest, coolest bird in the jungle, that's me.

I'm vice-president of the club. I don't have many official duties, although I do make sure to have plenty of snacks on hand for meetings. The reason I'm vice-president is that I am the only one in the club with my own phone and a private line, so we don't tie up anyone else's phone with all the calls we get. That's important. We meet in my room three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from five-thirty to six. That's a lot of phone time.

Our club treasurer is Stacey McGill, my best friend. The animal she picked was a big jungle cat, like a lion or a panther. I think that's perfect. Stacey has blonde hair, and huge eyes with dark, dark lashes, so she looks like one of those big, tawny cats. Plus, she has a certain elegance, as if she knows she's queen of the jungle.

Like me, Stacey likes clothes and fashion and experimenting with hairstyles and makeup. But while I'm a wild dresser, Stacey is

more trendy and sophisticated. I think that's because she grew up in New York City. And she still visits there a lot, because her father lives there. Stacey's parents got divorced not that long ago, and Stacey (luckily for me!) decided to live in Stoneybrook with her mom.

Stacey may look like a queen, but she has down-to-earth problems, just like anybody else. The divorce was hard on her, for one thing. Also, she has diabetes, which is a disease that keeps your body from handling sugar the way it should. (No doubt Janine could give you the full scientific explanation, but I sure can't.) What that means for Stacey is that she has to keep track of every single thing she eats, and she has to be really careful about avoiding sweets. She can't eat Ring-Dings or candy bars, no matter how hungry she is. Also, she has to check her blood sugar all the time and give herself shots of this stuff called insulin, every day. It sounds gruesome, but Stacey makes it seem like no big deal. We all admire her for that.